The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  "I would like to open my lecture with the following anecdote. There is a legend, and I hasten to underline the word legend, that I learned while I was travelling here and there. It seems there was a sorcerer, or an alchemist or something along those lines, who dreamed of transforming the world through the creation of an artificial man. This man, the sorcerer dreamed, would not be subject to the flaws and limitations of the former type, but would instead live through many lifetimes, accumulating the knowledge and wisdom it would one day use to serve and improve the human race. The sorcerer, like all dreamers of this kind, was intent upon his vision and not particularly concerned with its ramifications in a larger scheme of things. Thus, he set about employing all his thaumaturgical arts in the creation of his 'new man.' First, a physical form was made out of the simple materials of wood and wax, resulting in a grotesque thing rather like a gigantic ventriloquist's dummy. Next, the sorcerer practiced a secret chemistry and a hermetic linguistics to elevate this lifeless effigy into a rather admirable semblance of human life—fatefully admirable, I might add. Without wasting a moment glorying in his own achievement, uttering not a single word of self-praise, the sorcerer engaged his creature in a course of learning that would enable it to function and evolve toward its destiny after the sorcerer's death. However, it was not long after this regimen had begun that the Omnipotent One realized what the sorcerer was intending to do. And so it happened that the creature, strong and well-coordinated but still a child in its mind, was awakened in the dead of night by a voice that cursed it as a blasphemy and an abomination. The voice bid the creature to go to its foul maker in the attic where he had sequestered himself among evil books and impure devices. Confused and terrified, the creature ascended several stairways and entered the attic. And there he found the sorcerer, motionless and hung upon the wall like something in a puppet-maker's workshop, his dark robe grazing the dusty floor and his head drooping down. Acting on a mechanical impulse beyond dread or despair, the creature raised up his master's head and saw that it was now no more than wood and wax. The sight was a maddening one, and it did not take long for the creature to find the rope with which it hung itself from the rafters of the attic. Thus was concluded the judgment passed upon the house of the sorcerer."

  There was a pause in the scientist's flow of words. Calmly, he pulled a handkerchief from the inner pocket of his coat and wiped his face, which was perspiring in the heat of the footlights. Then he briefly scanned the faces of his audience, many of which bore dumbfounded expressions, before resuming his lecture.

  "Who can know the intentions of the Creator? That which is suited to human designs may not suit His. With these rather unquestionable premises in mind, what conclusions might be drawn from the example of the sorcerer? By way of exegesis, I would say that the sorcerer, in conceiving a creature of limitless promise for good and none for evil, had violated a mysterious law, transgressed against a secret truth. And how had he strayed from this law and this truth? Simply in this manner: he had failed to provide for the corruption of his creation, not merely as a possibility but as a fate. And it was precisely by this oversight that the sorcerer fell out of step with the Creator's own design. It is the vision of this Great Design that I have been privileged to see, and that is why I am here tonight. As a footnote, however, I should state that even before I was granted certain divine insights, I had already been travelling toward them, approaching their truth in the "unconscious or accidental manner of great scientific discoveries. And I thus found myself somewhat in readiness to receive and accept the proffered vision.

  "Let me explain that I have spent nearly all my life as a scientist in a methodically frantic pursuit of perfection, driven by the dream of Utopia, by the idea that I indeed contributed to an earthly paradise in the making. But slowly, very slowly, I began to notice certain things. I noticed that there were mechanisms built into the system of reality that nullified all our advancements in this world, that rerouted them into a hidden laboratory where these so-called blessings were cancelled out altogether, if not converted into formulas for our collapse. I noticed that there were higher forces working against us and working through us at the same time. On the one hand, our vision has always been of creating a world of perpetual vitality, despite our grudging recognition of death's 'necessity.' On the other hand, all we have constructed is an elaborate facade to conceal our immortal traumas — a false front that hides the perennial ordeals of the human race. Oh, the human race. And I began to see that perfection has never been the point, that both the lost paradise of the past and the one sought in the future were merely convenient pretexts for our true destiny of... disintegration.

  "As a scientist I have had the opportunity to observe the workings of the world at close quarters and over a relatively extended stretch of time, not to mention space. And after careful observation and painstaking verification I was forced to this conclusion: the world thrives on its faults and strives, by every possible means, to aggravate them, while at the same time to mask them like a congenital deformity. The signs are everywhere, though I could not always read them.

  "But if vitality and perfection are not the aim of this world, what in heaven's name is? That, my dear ladies and gentlemen, is the thrust of the second part of my exhibition, consisting of more comments by myself, a demonstration of my machine, and an entertaining display of what I might describe as a tableau mort. While I prepare things backstage, there will be a brief intermission. Thank you."

  Dr Haxhausen walked off the stage with sluggish dignity and, as soon as he was out of sight, the audience began chattering all at once, as if they had been simultaneously revived from a hypnotic trance. Most of them, in outrage, left the theater; some, however, stayed for the finale. And both reactions, as well as these relative proportions, were typical at each exhibition that Dr Haxhausen held. Those who prematurely left the performance were content to believe they had been witnesses to nothing more than the interior theater of a madman. The others, intellectuals or neurotic voyeurs, had convinced themselves that the former genius deserved a full hearing before the inevitable condemnation, while secretly dreading that something he had to show them would reverberate, however faintly, with truth.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said Dr Haxhausen, who seemed to reappear on stage out of nowhere. "Ladies and gentlemen," he repeated more quietly, and then fell silent for a rather extended moment. And no one was whispering in the audience; no one said a word.

  "There are holy places in this world, and I have been to some of them. Places where the presence of something sacred can be felt like an invisible meteorology. Always these places are quiet, and often they are in ruins. The ones that are not already at some stage of dilapidation nonetheless display the signs and symptoms, the promise of coming decay. We feel a sense of divinity in ruined places, abandoned places — shattered temples on mountaintops, crumbling catacombs, islands where a stone idol stands almost faceless. We never have such feelings in our cities or even in natural settings where the flora and fauna are overly evident. This is why so much is atoned for in wintertime, when a numinous death descends on those chosen lands of our globe. Indeed, winter is not so much the holiest time as it is the holiest place, the visible locus of the divine. And after winter, spring; thus turns the carousel of our planet, and all the others. But need it turn forever? I think not. For the ultimate winter draws near, ladies and gentlemen: the cycle of seasons, so the Creator has told me, is about to stop.

  "He first spoke to me on a night which I had spent wandering the tattered fringes of a city. It might have been a city like this one, or any city. What matters is the mute decrepitude I found there among a few condemned buildings and vacant lots gone wild. I had all but forgotten my own name, who I was and what world I belonged to. And they are not wrong who say that my reason perished in the radiant face of unattainable dreams for the future. False dreams, nightmares! And then, in that same place where I had travelled to hang myself, I heard a voice among the shadows and moonlight. It wa
s not a peaceful voice or a consoling voice, but something like an articulate sigh, a fabulously eloquent moan. There was also a man-like shape slumped down in a corner of that sad room which I had chosen for my ultimate refuge. The legs of the figure lay bent like a cripple's upon the broken floor, the moonlight cutting across them and leaving the rest of the body in darkness—all except two eyes that shone like colored glass in the moonlight. And although the voice seemed to emanate from everything around me, I knew that it was the voice of that sad thing before me, which was the Creator's earthly form: a simple department store mannikin.

  "I was the chosen one, It said. I would carry the message which, like every annunciation from on high, would be despised or ignored by mankind. Because I, at that moment, could clearly read the signs which had been present everywhere in the world since the beginning. I had already noted many of the hints and foreshadowings, the prophecies, and knew them as inspired clues the Creator had planted, prematurely revealing the nature of His world and its true destiny. And I felt the sacred aura radiated by the crumpled figure in the corner, and I understood the scripture of the Great Design.

  "It was written in the hieroglyphics of humble things, things humble to the point of mockery. All the lonesome pathetic things, all the desolate dusty things, all the misbegotten things, ruined things, failed things, all the imperfect semblances and deteriorating remnants of what we arrogantly deign to call the Real, to call... Life. In brief, the entire realm of the unreal—wherein He abides—is what He loves like nothing in this world. And haven't we ourselves at some time come face to face with this blessed realm? Can you recall ever having travelled down a deserted road and coming upon something like an old fairground: a desolate assemblage of broken booths and sagging tents, all of which you glimpsed through a high arcing entranceway with colors like a rusted rainbow? Didn't it seem as if some great catastrophe had struck, leaving only lifeless matter to molder in silent anonymity? And were you sad to see a place of former gaiety lying in its grave? Did you attempt to revive it in your imagination, start up the dead machinery, and fill the midway once again with fresh colors and laughing faces? We have all done this, all attempted to resurrect the defunct. And this is precisely where we have separated ourselves from the law and the truth of the Creator. Were we in harmony with Him, our gaze would fall upon a thriving scene and perceive nothing there but ruins and the ghosts of puppets. These, ladies and gentlemen, are what delight His heart. This much He has confided to me.

  "But the Creator's taste for the unreal has required something to be real in the first place, and then to wither into ruins, to fail gloriously. Hence—the World. Extend this premise to its logical conclusion and you have—curtain!—the Creator's Great Design." And as the curtain slowly began to rise, the scientist backed away and said in a giddy voice: "But please don't think that when everything caves in there won't still be muuusic."

  The auditorium went black, and in the blackness arose a hollow and tuneless melody which wandered to the wheezing accompaniment of a concertina, a pathetic duet belonging to a world of low cabarets or second-rate carnivals. Then, on either side of the stage, a tall glass case lit up to reveal that the two atrocious musicians were in fact life-size automatons, one of which pumped and pulled the snaking bellows of a concertina with a rigid motion of his arms, while the other scraped back and forth across the strings of a violin. The concertina player had his head thrown back in a wooden howl of merriment; the violin player stared down in empty-eyed concentration at his instrument. And both appeared lost in a kind of mechanical rapture.

  The rest of the stage area, both above and below, also seemed to be occupied entirely by imitations of the human image: puppets and marionettes were strung-up at various elevations, relieved of their weight by fragile glistening threads; mannikins posed in a paralyzed leisure which looked at once grotesque and idyllic; other dummies and an odd assortment of dolls sat in miniature chairs here and there, or simply sprawled about the floorboards, sometimes propping each other back to back. But among these mock-people, as became evident the longer one gazed at the stage, were hidden real ones who, rather ably, imitated the imitations. (These were persons whom Dr Haxhausen recruited, at fair recompense, whenever he entered a new town.) And forming the only scenery beyond both the artificial and the genuine figures of life was a gigantic luminescent mural in shades of black and white. With photographic accuracy, the mural portrayed a desolate room which might have been an attic or an old studio, and which contained some pieces of nondescript debris strewn about. A single, frameless window set into the torn wall at the rear of the room "looked out upon a landscape that was still more desolate than the room itself: earth and sky had merged into a gray and jagged scene.

  "You see how things are, ladies and gentlemen. Whereas we have been dreaming so long of creating perfect life in the laboratory, the Creator holds sacred only the crude facsimile, which best echoes or expresses His own will. He has always been far ahead of us, envisioning a completed work at the end of history. And He has no more time to linger over the vital stage of universal evolution. Because no truth or life can exist in us as we are, for truth and life can only exist in the mind, the will of the Creator—and we have stubbornly made it our business to do nothing but oppose that mind, that will. We are simply the raw material for His beloved puppets, which reflect to perfection the truth of the Creator and are the ideal dwellers in His paradise of ruins. And after His chosen ones are triumphantly installed in that good place, the Creator has some wonderful stories to tell as a way to pass the hours of eternity.

  "And we may be among those in paradise, this is the great news I bring to you tonight. We may take our place among the puppets, as the tableau you see before you will serve to demonstrate. For at the moment there are certain faces insinuated within this elect company that do not... belong, that stand out in an unpleasant way. How to bring them into the fold is the question. And the answer, if you will turn for a moment and direct your eyes toward the balcony, the answer—spotlight!—is the puppet machine."

  Turning their heads as instructed, the audience saw the object which, under the sharp spotlight, seemed to be resting on nothing, as if secured to the darkness itself. Some of the more observant members of the audience noticed the shining waxen faces whose eyes looked back at them from within the bizarre contraption. Set in motion by the remote control device in Dr Haxhausen's coat pocket, the machine noisily elevated its stovepipe neck and pointed its single, iridescent eye at the figures upon the stage.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, I mentioned earlier that winter is the sacred state of things, the season of the soul. But that is not to say that the definitive winter we are approaching will be without all the colors of the rainbow. For it is the frigid aurora of the Sacred Ray, the very eye of the Creator, that will bring about the wondrous conversion of all things. As you can see, the design is His own. And, by means of modern assembly techniques, a sufficient quantity may be produced to serve the world, bathing every one of us in the garish radiance of our destiny. The effects? If you just keep watching your fellows upon this stage.

  "There. See how the shafts of color pour down upon this stark scene, overlaying surfaces with an uncanny kaleidoscopic tint. It is the old surfaces that must be stripped away and disposed of. Time to leap from that summit of illusion our world has achieved, a glorious plummet after so many centuries in which we erred on the side of excellence. When all the Creator had in mind was a third-rate sideshow of beatific puppetry. But our strainings for progress were not useless; they were simply mistaken as to their ultimate aim. For it is modern science itself which will enable us to realize the Creator's dream, and to unrealize all the rest. See for yourselves. Look what is happening to the flesh of these future puppets, and to their eyes: wax and wood and shining glass to replace the sad and cumbersome structures of biology."

  In the audience a few low sounds propagated into a network of obscure whispers and murmurings. Faces leaned toward the spectacle of crazy puppets
painted with light, Dr Haxhausen's tableau mort. Some persons betrayed their cautious temperaments by dropping down in their seats, expanding the distance between themselves and the stream of colors that flowed over their heads on its way to the stage. Dr Haxhausen continued to preach above the shapeless, droning music.

  "Please do not concern yourselves that any lasting conversion is being worked upon the people in this exhibition. I told you earlier that I would do no such thing. In the absence of a willing heart, the conversion you have witnessed would be the greatest sin in the universe, the unpardonable sin. There. The Sacred Ray has been extinguished. Your friends are again as they once were. And I thank you for coming to see me. Good night."

  When the curtain descended and the house lights came on, an elderly woman in the audience stood up and called out to Dr Haxhausen: "The Lord saith, 'And if the prophet be deceived when he has spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel." Others simply laughed or shook their heads in disgust. But Dr Haxhausen remained silent, smiling placidly as the congregation filed out of the theater. The scientist, it seemed, was truly mad.

  A few remarks by way of an epilogue. Although certain people will attach themselves to virtually any innovation of a mystical nature, the prophecies of Dr Haxhausen never found a following. Soon the scientist himself lapsed in notoriety, save for an occasional blurb in some newspaper, a passing mention which often implied that Dr Haxhausen's later role as a crank doomsayer had, in the public mind, entirely eclipsed his former renown as a man of science. Finally, on a particular evening in December, as a sparse audience populated for the most part by boozy derelicts and noisy adolescents awaited the notorious exhibition in a dreary banquet hall, it seemed that another visionary's career was destined for oblivion. When the world famous hallucinator did not appear at the publicized time, someone took it upon himself to pull back the makeshift curtain of a makeshift stage. And there, gently swinging from the long sooty gibbet of his fantastic machine, hung Dr Haxhausen. Whether the cause of death should have been deemed murder or the more apparent one of suicide was never discovered. For something else happened that same winter night that threw all other events into the background.